Mediterraneans
ALL OF A TWIST
Reza Negarestani
Philosopher and writer born in Shiraz, Iran. He is the
author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials (2008), a work of theory-fiction on the
Middle East. He has also written for such journals
and anthologies as Collapse, Angelaki and CTheory.
In order to think narration in a world that is devoid of any
narrative necessity – an expanding space into which all
ideas of embodiments dissolve and an absolute time whose
radical contingency aborts any necessary difference to
which a narrative can be applied – first we must redeploy
the hierarchy of thought in nature as the view point or
locus of speculation and narration. The exteriority and
contingency of the real or the cosmic abyss is not what
should or can be objectified by thought; on the contrary,
it is thought that is objectified by the exteriority and
contingency of the real, which simultaneously and in every
instance gives rise to thought and usurps it. The very
hierarchy of thought that was supposed to bring the possi-
bility of reflection on the object or event X is turned upside
down and inside out, the space of reflection itself becomes
a playground for the exteriority and contingency of object
X. Now if narration is both ‘to know’ and ‘to relate’, not
only is the narration of/about the contingent reality
twisted with a logic endemic to tales of spirit possession
(when I think, it is actually the outsider, the demon inside
me that thinks through me), but also it is unfolded with
the dynamics inherent to conspiracy theories (all relations,
adventures and plots are twistedly driven by a secret
agreement – or complicity – between contingent and
indifferent objective worlds… the more epical the narration,
the thicker the conspiracy, the more elliptical the depth
of the complicity).
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In this hierarchical corruption of the narrative, the nar-
ration of any trivial or non-trivial reality turns from being
a reflection on the world and objects to being an inflection of
the world and objects themselves in their exteriority and con-
tingency. With regard to the narrative nomenclature, twist
is the name given to this troubling turn whereby contingent
aspects of the real reclaim the plot and fundamentally shake
the course and hierarchy of narration. In the wake of a twist,
whimsical imagination and extravagant plots are hardly
more than intuitive errancies since any mundane and super-
ficial world will turn out to be a local mode of dynamism or
materialisation of an incalculably weird universe. The twist,
therefore, has a spontaneous ability to reclaim and remo-
bilise all forms of plot, perspective and history by force,
collusion or contamination on behalf of a contingent outside.
It is this ability that gives the twist a veritable narrative
capacity that is asymptotic to crime, horror, conspiracy and
detective fictions.
When the twist occurs – that is to say, when it seizes
the trajectory of the reflection on behalf of the contingency
of the objective relations and contorts the course of the
narrative orientation – it forces a sweeping or perhaps even
a pulverising re-evaluation of the entire narrative trajectory.
This is especially evident in variants of pulp fiction from
horror stories to detective thrillers, crime novels and cons-
piracy fictions. The so-called plot twist seizes the reflective
space of narration or simply turns the ‘knowing’ of the
 Jorinde Voigt
Axiom X, 2010
Ink and pencil on paper
51 x 36 cm

17
 narration into the narrative object of contingencies
and, therefore, subjects the narration to an inquisitive
speculation from the perspective of complicity between
objective resources, which in radically contingent ways play
their influence over the narrative causality. What used to
be ‘knowing’ is now, all of a sudden, revealed to be a literary
gimmick facilitating a plummet into what was always
already there but could not be reflected upon – a short-lived
resolution (dénouement) degenerating into a cosmic conspi-
racy at the speed of a trashy airport thriller.
In the wake of the twist, the causal meshwork of the
narration is forcibly revised to a new system that is deter-
mined by the contingency of the twist. For this reason, the
twist, far from being mythoclastic, is at once pro-narrative
and mytho-accelerative; rather than shattering the plot
(mythoclasm), it remoulds and accelerates the plot through
reconstructing the causal system from the viewpoint of an
ineradicable alien presence that has suddenly erupted or has
long resided in the narration as an alien seed around which
the plot has been crystallised.1 Yet this alienating shift of
perspective is precisely equal to a descent wherein the
narrative has to unconditionally adopt any (alien) point
of view as the plot loses its established ground and the
contingent depth is traversed. Sometimes this alienating
descent is only registered as a vertiginous effect or a shock
(cf. the plot twist as a shock in pulp narratives, especially
giallo fiction). Other times, the descent becomes the narra-
tion itself. In the crime novels of Jim Thompson, such as
Pop. 1280 (1964) and The Killer Inside Me (1952), the first
person voice of the narrator is itself the twist that forms the
narrative while calmly – under nonchalant influences of a
global unconscious – pushing the entire (narrative) world
off the cliff.
The speculative power of the twist on the causal
configuration of the narrative is analogous to the shock of
trauma that sometimes simply overthrows all that has been
narrated. Yet there are also times when, instead of inflict-
ing a shock, the twist perforates the causal system of the
narrative from all directions, changing the plasticity and the
formation of the narrative to a new narration whose every
relation is a twist, a contingency in complicity with another
1 One example of this resident model of an object that randomly or homoge-
nously constructs the plot around itself is the so-called Chekhov’s gun, an
object that early in the story is introduced to the reader, then it is abandoned
and only later toward the end resurfaces to overshadow all human characters,
narrative events and their relationships. Contrary to Chekhov who believed
that an element introduced in the story must be used at some point, the gun
is merely a force of contingency that might or might not (for no reason at all)
resurface later in order to seize the trajectory of the plot. Hence in order to
understand the function of Chekhov's gun, one must twist Anton Chekhov’s
own words: ‘One must put a loaded rifle on the stage even if no one is thin-
king of firing it.’
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contingency ad infinitum. The twist, in this sense, becomes
another name for speculation from the other side, one whose
endemicity to the narrative dynamism makes its role crea-
tively problematic and whose irrepressible persistence for
a thoroughgoing re-examination and reconstruction of the
narrative world through the medium of contingency and
from the outside allies it with the force of trauma. Since
trauma is both an overthrowing contingency and a restruc-
turing building process that changes the horizon according
to contingent forces and objective resources of the Outside.
Now imagine a narrative book focused on a place on
this planet called the Middle East, with its oil and dust-
driven everyday life, with its controversial yet terrestrial
politics, its religions, its arid and hot climate. What would
be a veritable narrative of this place? One possible candidate
would be a geo-political narrative shaped by embracing
a Middle Eastern viewpoint (the victim, the other, the
Middle Easterner). Another alternative would be a global/
planetary narration (the Middle East as technologically,
ethnologically and economically inhomogeneous, the
breeding ground of terror or the land of ancient wisdoms).
Yet both these narrative viewpoints harbour a twist
that might creep on them at any moment for no reason
whatsoever, confiscating their narration on behalf of a
chasmic reality that can be narratively fabricated by the
complicity of cosmic viewpoints – a narration accreted by
the perspective of anonymous (cosmic) materials. In narra-
ting the Middle East, the triad of the narrator, the narrated
and the narration turns into the narrative object of cosmic
contingencies, extra-terrestrial gravitational fields and alien
influences: its petropolitics become the epic of hydrocar-
bons from a nether point of view, its religions, politics and
demography are revealed to be links in complicity between
terrestrial dynamics, solar radiations and stellar death, its
wars the tactical mobility of nested geo-cosmic traumas and
strategic perspectives spawned by contingent distribution
of cosmic matter throughout the planetary body. What
was supposed to be a theoretic or fictional speculation on
the Middle East turns out to be a narrative from a chasmic
point of view. It is not so much that this narrative is horrific
or suspenseful; it is the usurping nature of this alienating
 twist that finds its narrative asymptote in horror, conspira-
cy and crime fictions. When it comes to astute realism, the
regional or local speculation must be rethought and refor-
mulated from the universal or cosmic point of view, but to
do so means to affirm the vertigo of the twist that opens the
regional (the Middle East) into the cosmic and to prioritise
the role of the contingent turn by which the cosmic fabrica-
tes global and regional localities.
Here the twist as the force of the realist speculation
(realist in the sense that it is asymptotic to the contingent
reality that drives the universe) approximates the function of
the philosophy of Speculative Realism in which speculation
is not driven by our grounded experience or reflection but
by the exteriority and contingency of a universe that always
antedates and postdates us (that which thinks us from the
other side). Ironically, philosophy seems to have strived this
long only to become, belatedly, a crime fiction, a conspiracy
thriller in order to embrace the force of the radical twist and
paint itself yellow. This calls to mind the image of a philo-
sopher who has realised that in speculating the world, it has
been the world and its ‘strange aeons’ that have twistedly
narrated her all along.2 The philosopher’s vocation is to
recognise the abyssal cosmic twist that has given birth to her
speculation and to adopt the cosmic perspective as the only
viable commitment to reality. Thus spake Sutter Cane in The
Mouth of Madness (1995): ‘For years I thought I was making
all this up, but they were telling me what to write.’3
2 H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin
Books, 1999, p. 156.
3 In the Mouth of Madness, directed by John Carpenter, written by Michael De
Luca, 1995.
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Reza Negarestani,
Cyclonopedia:
Complicity with
Anonymous Materials.
Melbourne: re.press,
2008.
Cyclonopedia is the first horror and theory-fiction
book from and about the Middle East. It is a Middle
Eastern odyssey, where the author connects the
appalling vistas of contemporary world politics,
the politics of oil and the War on Terror to the
archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural
history of the earth itself. As a work of speculative
philosophy, Cyclonopedia addresses the everyday
life and politics of the region in the form of a pulp
horror novel in which voices of human narrators
are gradually replaced by inorganic noises. The
story is meticulously told from the ever-twisting
perspective of cosmic processes of formation.
Reza Negarestani’s forthcoming book The Mortilo-
quist is a hybrid of classical philosophy and play. It
draws on various genres of drama and performance
such as Greek tragedy and Viennese Actionism. In
The Mortiloquist, the history of Western philoso-
phy is staged by barbarian outlanders.
Collapse:
Philosophical Research
and Development.
Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2010.
Launched in 2006, Collapse is an independent,
non-affiliated journal of philosophical research and
development. Each volume of this internationally-
recognised journal has a specific theme and brings
together new works by and in-depth interviews with
contemporary artists, philosophers and scientists
who are leaders in their fields. Through this cross-
fertilisation, the journal attempts to develop new
and productive inquiry at the forefront of current
cultural, political and philosophical debate. Reza
Negarestani is a regular contributor to Collapse; he is
also an associate editor of the forthcoming volume.
The next issue of Collapse will be vol. VII: ‘Culinary
Materialism’, to be published in 2011. For further
information, visit www.urbanomic.com.